Visual pleasure and narrative cinema   Laura Mulvey
II  Measure in looking/fascination with the human form
(A) The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia (pleasure in looking). There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at. Originally, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia .is one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples centre on the voyeuristic activities of children* their desire to see and make sure of the private and forbidden (curiosity about other people's genital and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of the penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene). In this analysis scopophilia is essentially active. (Later, In 'Instincts and their Vicissitudes', Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further, attaching it initially to pre-gcniEal auto-eroticism, after which, by analogy, the pleasure of the look is transferred to others- There is a close working here of the relationship between the active instinct and its further development in a narcissistic form.) Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the eiotic basis for pleasure in looking at another ihnmpw. wntiifi person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, « \m Mpe*td m producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satis-Sufwiwi. i*,™ J faction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an obfec-: 1&7L-1. se 6-ib    rificd other.
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At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing [1ntj unwilling victim. What is seen on the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy. Moreover the extreme contrast between the darkness m the auditorium {which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spcrtarnrfi in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onro the performer.
(B) The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilij m its narcissistic aspecr. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world-Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognises its own image tn the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego. Several aspects of this analysis arc relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a time when children's physical ambitions outstrip their motor capacity, with the result that their recognition of themselves is joyous in that they imagine their mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than they experience in their own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognirian as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, prepares the way for identification with others in the future. This mirror moment predates language for the child.
Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of rccognitionymisrecogmtion and ideniLfica-dan, and hence of the first articulation or the 1, of subjectivity. This is a moment when an older fascination with looking (at the mother's face, for an obvious example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love affair/despair between image and self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in tbc cinema audience. Quite apart from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the framing of the human form in its surrounding^ for instance), the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary toss of ego while atmultaiieously reinforcing it. The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has come to
VISUAL PLEASURE AMD NAfiBAflVt CINEMA
perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostalgically reminiscent of that prc-subjective moment of image recognition. While at the ume time, the cinema has distinguished itself in the production of ego ideals, through the star system for instance, Stars provide a focus or centre both to screen space and screen story where they act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary).
(q Sections A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight- The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the sown (active scopophUiaj, the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator's fascination with the recognirion of his like. The first is 3 function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation polarises in terms of pleasure. But both are formative structures, mechanisms without intrinsic meaning. In themselves they have no signification, unless attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceprual reality, and motivate eroticised phantasmagoria that affect the sub jeer's perception of the world to make a mockery of empirical objectivity.
During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a particular illusion of reality in which this contradiction between libido and ego has found & beautifully complementary fantasy world. In reality the fantasy world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it. Sexual instincts and identification processes have a meaning within the symbolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image tri-ir crystallises this paradox.
III Woman as image, man as bearer of the look
I A) In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/mate and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to cunnote to-be-hokeA-ai-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the lettmatif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip* tease, from Zicgfetd to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays ro and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combines spectacle and
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narrative. (Note, however, how in the musical song-and-dance numbers interrupt, the How of the dicgesis.) The presence of woman is an ndispen5. able element of spectacle in normal narrative film, ye: her visual presence tends to work against rhe development of a story-tine, to fre?2e the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetricher has put it>
What counu is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the Inve or fear she inspires in the hero, Or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In hcc-iclf the woman has not the slightest importance.
(A recent tendency in narrative film has been ro dispense with this problem altogether hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the 'buddy movie*, in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction.) Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on eirher side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show-girl allows the rwo looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative; the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are nearly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman cakes the film into a no man's land outside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe's first appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall's songs in To Have and Have Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One parr of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative; it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon, rather than verisimilitude, to the screen.
(B) An active/passive heterosexual division of labour has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the harden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant ro gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's rote as the active one of advancing the story, making things happen. The man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-diegctic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made* possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects: bis look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both
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VISUAl PUASUFU AND MARBATSVi UWSMA
giving a satisfying sense of omni potence. A male movie stať? glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, hut those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than trie subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control oř motor co-ordination.
In contrast to women as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space correspond-ing ro that of the mirror recognition, in which the alienated subject internalised his own representation of hip Imaginary existence. He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements {determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible echting {demanded by realism), all tend to blur the limits of screen sprite. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action. (There arc films with a woman as main protagonist, of course. To analyse this phenomenon seriously here would take me too far afield. Pam Cook and Claire Johnston's study of The Rettolt of Mamie Stover in Phil Hardy (ed.), Raoui Walsh (Edinburgh, 1974), shows in a striking case how the strength of this female protagonist is more apparent than real.)
{CI) Sections Hi A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment {connoting male fantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Hove Wmg* and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her roo.|
But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the visually ascertainable absence of the penis, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the taw of the father. Thus the woman as icon,
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displayed for rhc gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of tne look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety ii originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety-preoccupation with the re-enactment of die original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced hy the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object [an avenue typified by the concerns of the film »orr}\ or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence overvaluation, the cult of the female star).
This second avenue, fenshistic scopopbilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjugating the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side tirs in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, 3 battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear rime with a beginning and an end. Fetishisric scopnphiUa, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone. These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated mure simply by using wotks by Hitchcock and Sternberg, both of whom take the look almost as the content or subject matter of many of their films. Hitchcock is the more complex, as he used both mechanisms. Sternberg's work, on the other hand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia.
(C2J [. . .] In Hitchcock [. , ,\ die male hero does see precisely what the audience sees. However, although fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism can be die subject of the film, it is the role of the hero to portray the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator. In Vertigo in particular, but also in Mamie and Rear Window., the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non-cinematic. His heroes ate exemplary of the symbolic otder and the law - a policeman [Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and power {Mamie) - but their erotic drives lead them into compromised situations. The power to subject another- person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onro the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman [evoking castration, psychoanalytical^ speaking). True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness - the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock's skilful use of identification processes and liheral use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze. The spectator is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis, which parodies his own in the cinema.
visual PLEASURE AND NABRAtlVE ClUEMA
lit an analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema, Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the sciccil A* ht watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa bad been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so long as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their relationship is reborn erutically. He does not merely warch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus finally giving him the opportunity to save her. Lisa's exhibitionism has already been established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a passive image of visual perfection; Jeffries'? voyeurism and activity have also been established through his work as a photo-journalist, a maker of stories and captor of images. However, his enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the fantasy position of the cinema audience.
In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from one flashback from Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view. ScotuVs voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant; he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result, he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning.
In the second part of the film, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he loved to watch secretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every derail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottic's active sadistic voyeurism. She knows he* part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scotfie'serotic interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through: she is punished.
Thus, in Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look boomerangs: the spectator's own fascination is revealed as illicit voyeurism as the narrative content enacts the processes and pleasures that he is himself exercising and enjoying. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal superego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking. Far from being simply an aside on the perversion of the police, Vertigo focuses on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in terms of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero. Mamie, too, performs for Mark Rutland's gaze and masquerades as
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the perfect to-be-looked-at image. He, too, is on the side of the law until drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime, make her confess and thus save her. So he, too becomes complkir as be acts out the implications of his power. He controls money and words; he can have his cake and eat it.
JV Summary
The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this article is relevant to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film. The scopophilic insrinct {pleasure in looking at another person as an erode object) and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes) act as formations, mechanism*, which mould this cinema's formal attributes. The actual image of woman as {passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the content and structure of representation, adding a further layer of ideological significance demanded by the patriarchal order in its favourite cinematic form - itltisionistic narrative film. The argument must return again to the psychoanalytic background; women in representation can signify castration, and activate voyeuristic or fetishistk mechanisms to circumvent this threat. Although none of these interacting layers is intrinsic to film, it is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect and beautiful contradiction, thanks to the possibility in the cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. The place of the look defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows and so on. Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ncss, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of rime (editing, narrative} and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged.
To begin with (as an ending), the voyeurisric-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters ar each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threar constantly endangers
VISUAL r-'.i A : I.-!-c xHO NARRATIVE ClNtMA
the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an tntrusive, static, one-dimcjitional fetish- Thus the two luoks materially present in time and space arc obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation thai revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera's look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator's surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Simultaneously, the look of the audience is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as ferishisric representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and the erotic image on the screen appears dirrcdy (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetish-tsatioa, concealing as it does castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him.
This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical film-makers) is to free cbe look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment. There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the 'invisible guest1, and highlights the way film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret,.
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